(From a thread that started on Chaos Manor)

thoughts on required minimum wage

My personal point of view…after forty-five years in the work force.
The battle for a reasonable or ‘sane’ minimum wage is more or less lost. There will be long term detrimental effects for decades to come.
Ah So!   Can we take a page out of the Left’s playbook and start a new game?   What is to prevent the Congress (that’s the Congress that we gave to the GOP that they, to date, have done nothing with) from creating a new ‘(to be named later)’ Federal Wage guideline low enough to guarantee employment to any person under the age of twenty-one that is willing to work and wants to learn how to do a job.    Any job.
Yes, I know. That has been proposed in the past. But since it falls within the province of the Unions, and the Unions demand a much higher wage for their apprentices (so the Union dues won’t wipe out their first paycheck) the toadies in Congress go along with that reasoning,  even through the Union hiring is anything but fair or unbiased.   The main victims of this are the black urban youth that are (in truth) desperately in need the income and the discipline of a real job.

But frankly this is beginning to be a problem for everyone under the age of twenty-five. It is amazing to me that today it is not unusual to find a young adult twenty-five years old that is only now starting their first job.   To me that is astounding!   I had my first paying job that freed me from the childhood ‘allowance’ at the age of thirteen.  Actually two jobs; a local paper route and that summer a part-time job with a builder.  The paper route is self explanatory, the builder had me picking things up, carrying things from one place to another and (shudder!) scraping stickers off the pane of glass of every window in a newly built house. I actually got fired from the second job, I screwed it up. And that’s the point.
If you don’t get the chance to screw up when you’re a teen, then you are not going to enjoy your first job if it comes at twenty-five.   Federally imposed rules for the workplace are not going to bring joy when they are applied to twenty-plus adults on their first job.
So lets get more of those teens a job, but it isn’t going to be a job at the ridiculous rate of $15/hour, a buck an hour over the maximum that a retired Senior will get to live on (who probably isn’t living with their parents anymore). But closer to $5/hour. Enough to buy work clothes, gas, lunch money and a future.  (and shorn of the equally job-killing elements of mandatory health insurance, Social Security payments, etc…)

Their own future, not the future envisioned by the unemployable plutocrats in Washington who are using this stupid quest for a $15/hour minimum wage as a boon to their labor unions whose members are guaranteed a hourly wage structure above the minimum wage whatever it happens to be!